ANCIENT FAMILIAR

There are places we visit, and places that seem... somehow, to remember us.

I felt an unexpected kinship with Norway... something difficult to locate between ancestry, imagination, and the land itself. Perhaps it was blood memory. Perhaps it was simply the scale of things... mountains rising abruptly from dark water, villages gathered beneath impossible cliffs, weather moving visibly across enormous skies. But there was a flavor to the place that was beyond explanation.

From Oslo, through Geirangerfjord and Bergen, and eventually north to the Lofoten Islands, I began to understand how profoundly a landscape can shape the people who inhabit it... their architecture, mythology, restraint, resilience, and sense of beauty. In Lofoten especially, the boundary between landscape and myth seemed remarkably thin.

Ancient Familiar is a collection about that strange recognition... encountering somewhere for the first time and wondering why some part of you feels it has been there before.